I’ve recently taken on the role of Cultural Programming Curator at Dominique Lévy Gallery where I’ve been programming performances for the last year or so. This Thursday the wonderful new percussion ensemble Sandbox Percussion will perform in celebration of our current exhibit of the sculptor Joel Shapiro. To sonically consider the playful weightlessness and the deceptive simplicity of Shapiro’s materials, forms and suspended installations, Sandbox Percussion will perform a program of Akiho, Cage, Crowell and Reich on December 8th.http://www.dominique-levy.com/http://www.sandboxpercussion.com/

Lauded by The Washington Post as “revitalizing the world of contemporary music” with “jaw dropping virtuosity,” Sandbox Percussion has established themselves as a leading proponent in this generation of contemporary percussion chamber music. Sandbox made their New York debut in 2012 and in their fourth season last year gave a staggering twelve world premieres by new music composers at venue’s including the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, the Yale New Music Workshop, Peabody Conservatory, Curtis Institute, Cornell University, and Brooklyn’s National Sawdust. Through compelling collaborations with composers and performers, Jonathan Allen, Victor Caccese, Ian Rosenbaum and Terry Sweeney seek to engage a wider audience for classical music.

This Thursday, December 1st, 6pm at the Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art at Harvard University artist/activist Shani Jamila will give a talk and present her short film Altar: A Moving Meditation, featuring the electro-acoustic vocal music I made with Alicia Hall Moran. Altar was premiered at the New Museum in September and is fittingly screened at Cooper Gallery as part of the exhibit of artist Carrie Mae Weems – I once knew a girl…

Through a serendipitous intersection in my life, my work at Dominique Lévy Gallery has evolved to include occasional music programming, and on June 7th we will present the phenomenal Jen Shyu in a performance of her Solo Rites: Seven Breaths. I saw this gorgeous and intense piece premiered at Roulette in 2014 and thought it would be a wonderful compliment to the first U.S. solo exhibition and career survey of the Korean, monochrome artist Chung Sang-Hwa, presented in collaboration between Dominique Lévy Gallery and Greene Naphtali Gallery. This is a FREE event with RSVP to mackie@dominique-levy.com

“She has drawn large parts of her music from travel and study in places including East Timor, Taiwan and Indonesia, where she has learned spoken languages, folk narratives, dances and instrumental techniques… There’s great erudition in her work, but she wears it lightly; what you notice, both in her singing and her band-leading, is wild originality, purpose and discipline.” – The New York Times

Tomorrow, Ergo will perform in celebration of our new release, As subtle as tomorrow on Cuneiform Records.

It was a long road to make and finally get this music released, over two years the seven pieces were composed concurrently, sharing melodies, motifs all while developing the Max/MSP software instrument that would transform those acoustic components into electronic reflections. The post-production took just as long, but has been a fulfilling process, bringing me together with so many collaborators, including the good folks of Cuneiform records, the musicians, various recording engineers, photographers, and visual artists, including one of my oldest friends, artist Alex Barry, who made this stunning watercolor animation for Yet but, from the new record.

No project ever turns out as magnificently as you imagine at the outset, but I feel really proud of this one. With so much great music out there my hope is that this record at least occupies a place of it’s own in today’s jazz landscape, and I hope you can join us tomorrow.

I’m very excited to invite you to the third iteration of my piece Sine Qua Non, presented by CT-SWaM Spatial Sound Summer Sessions at Fridman Gallery, August 28, 8pm (performance) 29-30, 12-6pm (installation). Sine Qua Non is an electro-acoustic performance that transforms into a generative sound installation, with this latest iteration featuring singer Alicia Hall Moran, acclaimed for her work in Porgy & Bess, the 2012 Whitney Biennial, and collaborations with Bill T. Jones, Carrie Mae Weams and her husband Jason Moran, among others.

In something like a Mobius strip of sonic ideas, Hall Moran is sampled and processed live by Sroka with a Max/MSP software instrument, her singing becomes her accompaniment and foil and the improvisation develops through electronic abstraction and acoustic response. As the physical performance concludes the sampled fragments slowly take over, and the computer performance continues to evolve via generative processing. Seven unique outputs of the Max/MSP instrument are each mapped to a separate speaker, immersing the gallery in an ever-changing abstraction of the performance over the following two days.

This past September at the Arteles Creative Center in Finland I contributed sound to a site specific, light mapping installation by French multi-media artist Barthélemy Antoine-Lœff. Bart is a brilliant person, versed in sculpture, video, theater, digital arts, installation and co-founder of the Paris-based collective Iduun, and I hope we can collaborate again soon.